Within-host diversity of SARS-CoV-2 in COVID-19 patients with variable disease severities
التاريخ
2020المؤلف
Al Khatib, Hebah A.Benslimane, Fatiha M.
El Bashir, Israa
Al Thani, Asmaa A
Yassine, Hadi M.
البيانات الوصفية
عرض كامل للتسجيلةالملخص
Background: The ongoing pandemic of SARS-COV-2 has already infected more than eight million people worldwide. The majority of COVID-19 patients are either asymptomatic or have mild symptoms. Yet, about 15% of the cases experience severe complications and require intensive care. Factors determining disease severity are not yet fully characterized. Aim: Here, we investigated the within-host virus diversity in COVID-19 patients with different clinical manifestations. Methods: We compared SARS-COV-2 genetic diversity in 19 mild and 27 severe cases. Viral RNA was extracted from nasopharyngeal samples and sequenced using Illumina MiSeq platform. This was followed by deep-sequencing analyses of SARS-CoV-2 genomes at both consensus and sub-consensus sequence levels. Results: Consensus sequences of all viruses were very similar, showing more than 99.8% sequence identity regardless of the disease severity. However, the sub-consensus analysis revealed significant differences in within-host diversity between mild and severe cases. Patients with severe symptoms exhibited a significantly (p-value 0.001) higher number of variants in coding and non-coding regions compared to mild cases. Analysis also revealed higher prevalence of some variants among severe cases. Most importantly, severe cases exhibited significantly higher within-host diversity (mean= 13) compared to mild cases (mean=6). Further, higher within-host diversity was observed in patients above the age of 60 compared to the younger age group. Conclusion: These observations provided evidence that within-host diversity might play a role in the development of severe disease outcomes in COVID-19 patients; however, further investigations is required to elucidate this association.
معرّف المصادر الموحد
https://doi.org/10.29117/quarfe.2020.0280DOI/handle
http://hdl.handle.net/10576/16504المجموعات
- أبحاث فيروس كورونا المستجد (كوفيد-19) [801 items ]
- Theme 5: Covid-19 Research [32 items ]